in memoriam
by c-cruxe
Summary: An obituary of sorts for the twenty-seven known deaths of the second war. Vignettes.


This is something I've been working on since June and I'm posting it today as a sort of anniversary present to myself. I've been on this website for five whole years now - doesn't time _fly?_ - and my primary fandom still remains as Harry Potter. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you like it, have any criticisms or general comments, please leave a review!

Please note that I've taken an artistic licence to several deaths that were not clearly stated within canon.

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><p><strong>bertha jorkins<strong>

She orders dinner at the Inn, bemused at the inefficient muggle cooking practises. Her table is next to a window and the view is of a lush forest; and it is impossible to ignore the man who emerges from the trees, small and ugly and familiar, but long dead.

Curiosity has always been her most defining trait, after forgetfulness. She leaves her table and then the Inn, nodding at the staff. She assures them she will be back in time for her meal in halting Albanian. "I've just spotted an old friend," she says.

Peter Pettigrew looks surprised to see her, then anxious. He asks her to take a walk through the forest with him whilst he tells her how he is alive; it is well known that she is a notorious gossip, but dumb as a post, and too trusting. He talks with a stutter and his eyes flicker in every direction like he's expecting an attack. She doesn't realise, but he's fingering his wand.

They reach a clearing, where the trees are decaying and there is a bitter taste in the air. There is a tiny figure in the corner, the size of an infant, and its eyes are red.

"Stupefy!" Peter says.

She never does return for her meal.

**frank bryce**

It's almost justice when the residents find his body, still and peaceful and dead, on the half-decrepit Riddle Manor's grounds. Almost, because he didn't suffer. Heart attack, stoke, unknown cancer – they speculate many causes, but they are all wrong.

He is the first muggle victim of the war. He leaves behind no family and no friends; only rumours and bitter regrets.

**cedric diggory**

Cho kisses him before the task and tells him to come back to her, victorious or not. She tells him she loves him, voice quiet and strong. The maze beckons him, but she is in the crowd, watching and cheering. It is not an easy task, especially with the foul play involved, but he endures and she waits for him to return to her.

It is a Hogwarts victory. They touch the cup and vanish.

When she sees him next, he is dead.

**sirius black**

When they joined the fight during the first war, James and Sirius got drunk and talked about how they wanted to die. Nineteen years old and alight with bravery and youth, they wanted to go down fighting. A heroic death. A Gryffindor death.

And this is how it happens:

The Department of Mysteries is filled with spell fire, the smell of ozone burns his nose and his wand releases a torrent of vicious spells. He fights back to back with his godson, manic grin on his face. He is alive in combat, but only just. Azkaban has taken the sheen off him, taken his youth and stamina; when the curse comes, he takes it to the chest and the veil swallows him whole.

**amelia bones**

They attack at night. She wakes to the smell of burning wood and smoke curling into her bedroom from underneath the door. She grabs her wand, tumbles out of bed and stumbles to the door, coughing. The door won't open, no matter what spell she throws at it. The window too. She feels panic crawl up her throat like fingers.

Fifteen minutes too late, reinforcements arrive to save her. By then, she is a charred pile of bones and revenge. By tomorrow, she will be a front-page headline. In a few years, she will barely be a name in a history book – and perhaps, after death, anonymity is the greatest tragedy of all.

**emmeline vance**

She knows enough about the muggle world to look in both directions before crossing the road and her clothes are sophisticated enough to blend in with the business types that frequent the Whitehall area, but none of this helps her when they hit her in the back with an _Imperio_. Bustling people and reckless drivers pay no attention to the confident woman who strides into the alley between two tall, innocuous buildings.

They don't release her from the curse and it is almost a mercy, because when an unfortunate muggle stumbles into the alley a few days later, he finds her body hacked into pieces.

**florean fortescue**

Business during the winter is always slow, but these days it's damn well non-existent. The ice cream parlour isn't grand in size and yet, without any customers filling the tables and chairs, it feels cavernous. He sighs, cleaning an ice cream scoop by hand, and contemplates closing a few hours earlier. It isn't like anyone's bustling for ice cream in these tough times.

He finishes cleaning the scoop and puts it away, flicking his wand to get the chairs to stack themselves on the tables. He is in the process of clearing the till when the door opens. Looking up, feeling both frustrated and happy for the business, he sees two men in black cloaks and white bone masks, and freezes.

"Florean Fortescue," the one on the left says, voice deep and gravelly. "Your presence has been requested by the Dark Lord."

And that's a death sentence right there. Panic seizes his stomach. He fights them, but his strength lies with history and customer service and, eventually, he is brought before the Dark Lord.

Two weeks later, they find his lifeless body in a drain.

**igor karkaroff**

He is somewhere in the north of England, hiding in an abandoned shack. The shack is cold and miserable. It has been raining heavily for several days here, and the rotting wood walls are decayed enough to allow too much water in for there to be any semblance of comfort. He daren't use his wand to Vanish the water, either, because _he_ can track magic and the last thing he wants is to be found.

Shuddering in his damp furs, he wraps his arms around himself. This is still better than Azkaban, he tells himself. This is still better than death.

His breath falls out of him in uncontrollable, noisy bursts. He might be hysterical, or maybe delusional. Perhaps both. It doesn't matter, though, because through his heaving breaths he hears a terrible voice. "Morsmorde!" It says, but in that word he sees the end of his life.

The Ministry arrives at the sight of a Dark Mark in the hills of Cumbria and the sight of his crucified body makes more than one of the Aurors throw up.

**mrs abbott**

The begonias fail to blossom the summer of 1996, and she blames it on the abysmal weather. If she were uninformed (she isn't), she'd probably say the constant fog and drizzle is unnatural (it is). She was never that good at DADA, but she knows the effects of a dementor as well as the next witch. But her husband tells her not to worry, and she doesn't.

They come for her when she's attending to the wilted flowers, dirt smudged on her nose and wand lying uselessly in the kitchen. Cloaks dark and ratty and terrible, hissing in breath through their gaping mouths and staring at her with empty eye sockets, hoods lowered: two dementors. She screams. Scaled, rotting bone fingers grasp the sides of her rounded face and bring their mouths together in an awful mockery of a kiss.

The scream cuts off abruptly.

**albus dumbledore**

There is a chill that reaches deep into his bones, harsher and more jarring than the dull ache of stalled poison in his veins. He is an old man and every year has never seemed heavier, or perhaps his shoulders have grown too tired and weak to support their weight. Either way, he sags against the tower wall and tries to focus through the whispers of memory – of Arianna, of Abe, of Gellert – to the drawn face of Draco Malfoy.

The boy is not a killer. He has known it from the very beginning, can see it even now from the indecisiveness in the boy's face and the shake of his hand. It takes something more than the boy has to mutter those two words and make the spell work; it takes more than the boy has to see that iridescent green light form and know that he has the capacity to kill – and he is glad in a sad, weary way.

Behind the boy, Severus Snape emerges from the staircase. The man's face is impassive at the scene: several leering Death Eaters facing him as he leans pitifully against the wall, threatened by the wand of one of his own students. The two men lock eyes across the room, and he nods minutely as another Death Eater starts talking, doubting.

"Severus… please…" he whispers, and he is so tired in a way that sleep can never fix. That he will not fight in this war, that he leaves it all to Harry, is just another regret on his overloaded shoulders – and maybe he is a coward for not staying out the course but the end is in sight and he longs for it desperately.

And Severus's face, too old and haggard for his age, fixes into an expression that is slightly too feral to be fake. Revulsion and anger and hate fall into the deep lines of his face and he deserves it because Severus is a million regrets searing through his blood, the crack in his aged heart. It is a terrible thing to know one has the capacity to kill, but it is even worse to use someone for it.

"_Avada Kedavra!_"

And it is an end, regret filled and awful, but an end nonetheless.

**charity burbage**

Blonde and fair skinned, but still not quite beautiful, she'd always dreamed of another life, a better life. It was why she'd taken such an interest in Muggle Studies, staring at pictures of airplanes and toasters, thinking of a life she'd never lived. Her life wasn't bad, per se, in the way that it was neither all that good; it was an adequate sort of mediocre.

Well, it had been. She'd pursued her passion and taught it at Hogwarts, as close as she was going to get to going muggle whilst still being magical, and she'd liked it well enough. That is until _spells launching terror kidnapping dungeons torture hate_ – and those red, red eyes.

Suspended above their meeting table, eyes frantically searching for mercy and finding none, even in her once ally, she finally resigns herself to her fate. Blood drips down her arm onto the table and she looks into those demon eyes, thinking of all her muggle horror stories, flinching when the green spell comes.

**hedwig**

The iron bird machine is disorientating, twisting and turning frantically in mid air. Squawking indignantly, she decides that natural flight is much more preferable and feels a flash of irritation that her human has not deigned to let her find her own way. She would bite him but she's in the cage and from what she can see, he likes this roaring machine no more than she.

Suddenly, terrifyingly, the cage starts to slip out of the sidecar. Her wings spread, flapping uselessly within the tarnished metal bars and _merlin_, this is a terribly ironic way to die –

Hands stall the decent. Her human has brilliant eyes, the dazzling green of grass in spring, and they're terrified. His strong, bony fingers hold onto the handle of the cage and relief soars through her; her human will never let her go, surely –

The iron bird machine lurches out of the path of furious green jets of light, shocking them all. He's still got hold of the cage though and they'll make it, because she and her human have been through so much and it can't end now, not in this –

The green light hits her in the back.

**alastor 'mad-eye' moody**

His eye lets him see them before Mundungus, greasy wand grasped loosely between Potter's bony fingers, does. It's only a few seconds, and they're still too far to be in spell range, but it's long enough for him to recognise the pale skin and dark robes of the Dark Lord, flying seemingly without aid. His wand, a slightly battered masterpiece, is steady in his hand and his heart is pounding to the beat of battle drums. Aerial combat wasn't something they covered at the Academy, but damn if he isn't going to give this his all.

The thing about him is that he isn't afraid to die – he's been expecting it for at least the last twenty years – and it's this absence of fear that allows him to truly give his all in a fight. But this does not mean he wants to die. He fights to protect, to prevent darkness from overcoming his country, and he will do so until he can't anymore. So he starts to incant, and this is where it all goes wrong.

Mundungus Fletcher, the great sodding _coward_, finally catches sight of Lord Voldemort. The man lets out a squeak, eyes bulging comically behind the glasses on his polyjuiced face, and apparates away. His broom hangs in the air for a single second, before falling harshly to the ground. He tries to ignore it, but fury bursts inside him.

His focus snaps to Voldemort, along with his wand – but it's too late. The spell hits him in the face, and he is dead before his body starts to fall.

**rufus scrimgeour**

He goes like this: eyes rolling madly, veins bulging in his neck, limbs flailing in wild spasms, but teeth locked so hard that he bites through his tongue. Words that will damn a nation are stuck in his throat, waiting to spill out of his mouth, but he clenches and clenches and dies; and this is heroism in all its gritty, awful glory.

**gellert grindelwald**

Numregard is a relic that the world forgot, and he is too. Body rotting in his fraying, threadbare robes, he's slumped in his prison cell, waiting to die. When the snake-lord finds him, he's half torn between bemusement and boredom, too old to truly care about this newer, more terrible, more chilling version of dark lord that circumstance has spawned. Voldemort seeks that which is long gone, the fool, chasing after hallows whilst his empire shakes under his feet.

He dies for his insolence, but there is a toothy smile on his ragged face, and it is these small victories that count.

**ted tonks & dirk creswell**

It was never really a question of if, but when for them. Mudbloods, both of them, abominations of the wizarding world, but unwilling to accept this; really, who were they trying to kid? The snatchers are loud when they stumble upon their campsite, but their group is tired from constantly running, and they are seized without much ado. They check their names on the list, find them on that effing muggleborn register, and all of them wait for what happens next.

After all, a dead mudblood has the same value as a live one to the Ministry.

**peter pettigrew**

He is no stranger to regret – the name _Wormtail_ makes him wince when his master speaks it – but it is always more acute when he meets the too-green eyes of Harry Potter. The boy makes him uneasy. His very magic bows to the boy, whispering of debts to be paid, whispering of traitors. And Harry looks so very much like James, even bloodied and in the darkness of the Malfoy dungeons.

It doesn't stop him. It should – but there is _nothing_ he won't do to save himself. His path is littered with the bodies of his friends and the ashes of the happy childhood he burned to the ground. The silver hand, the foreign entity that simultaneously is and isn't part of him, wraps itself around the boy's throat, squeezing. The moment is almost glorious.

But his magic is swirling like a hurricane through his limbs. The boy– the damned brat– he speaks those damned words and the hand pauses. Fear surges through him. The silver hand hovers for a moment before gliding to his own throat, squeezing just as mercilessly as before, no matter what he commands. His magic compels it to remain and he is powerless, eyes bulging as his air runs out, terror freezing him, panic consuming him-

And he dies with his body betraying him. It is a fitting end.

**dobby**

They tell him House Elves are useless. They tell him self-respect is not something House Elves are allowed. They tell him that the power surging through his veins is not a power, but a device to serve wizards.

He decides they are wrong. He decides his master is a bad wizard. He decides that Harry Potter is a good wizard, and Harry Potter is. He decides that Harry Potter is his friend. Later, he decides that Harry Potter, his friend, is worth dying for.

So when the bad witch throws the knife towards them, her aim deathly accurate, he makes sure it's lethal blade penetrates his mortal flesh and not Harry Potter's. It hurts so much, worse than all his old master's punishments, but the thought of losing Harry Potter makes him hurt much worse. He looks into Harry Potter's eyes as the life fades from him and there are tears and he considers for the first time that Harry Potter will possibly mourn _him_, Dobby, the useless House Elf.

He dies knowing Harry Potter was worth dying for.

**vincent crabbe**

His blood pounds through his veins at the sight of the them and the sudden rush of malice makes him feel giddy. He is a better wizard this year, the dark magic flowing from his wand with ease, and he finally understands what it means to have power. All these years of standing in the background, powerless, have made him resentful and, therefore, dangerous. He is ready to show them what he can do now that there are many destructive spells in his arsenal. It is satisfying to note each one is perfect for ridding the world of mudbloods and blood traitors, who seem more than adept at avoiding his killing curses.

Teeth bared, the spell that Professor Carrow barred him from practising buzzes through his head. Devastating, Carrow had said, that _Fiendfyre_. Too dangerous.

He casts it anyway.

Fire spirals out of his wand. Creatures rise from the inferno – chimaeras, giant snakes, dragons – with great snapping mouths, multiplying and rising in glorious explosions above the burning junk. He is in awe at the sheer brutality of it, of how it burns and burns and burns, unstoppable.

It is only as the fire surges towards him, blocking all escape, that he begins to regret casting a curse that he does not know how to end. This regret, like the rest of his body, is consumed wholly in one agonising, scorching moment.

**fred weasley**

They split up, he and George, and perhaps this is his first bad omen. It feels strange to be fighting with Percy, the estranged brother, the brother he never quite _got_ – but shared blood is thick, and doubts can be ignored. Their wands flash with spells and he finds it ironic that perfect prefect Percy is fighting and using magic in the corridors - which is decidedly against the rules – in the tiny, distant part of his brain that isn't focusing on staying alive.

His second omen comes when Percy makes a joke. A decent, actually funny joke. The moment is startling, almost absurdly so, but it gives him hope that there is a chance for them to all make it through this and be a proper family again -

The final omen occurs when the floor beneath his feet rumbles and his world explodes.

**remus lupin**

His wedding ring feels heavy on his finger as he leaves Tonks and Teddy, the son that he never expected. It is the tragic irony of his life that things always fall apart when they are perfect. He knows an awful lot about death and as he runs into the courtyard, he can taste decay in the back of his throat. Their cosy home has never seemed so far away.

The spell that just misses his cheek smells of ozone and it singes the greying hair next to his ear. The wolf, tamed and hidden behind protection shields for all these months, rages within his mind and he is snarling a curse right back at Dolohov before he consciously decides to act. Their fight is brutal and consuming and his body _aches_, but to stop is to die and he's never had so much to lose –

But he is just that tiny bit too slow and Dolohov is just that tiny bit better and the spell that slams into him is just a tiny bit too fatal.

**nymphadora tonks**

Her Hufflepuff loyalty does not let her remain at home while Remus goes to fight. Her body is still weak from birthing Teddy and she has not been in battle for almost a year, but her mind remembers Auror training too vividly to stay at home. She kisses her son and hugs her mother goodbye and apparates away, into Hell.

The stench of blood and sweat and burnt flesh permeates the air of Hogsmeade. Retching, she runs all the way to the castle, her heart pumping to battle drums. She stumbles through the fallen, the fighting, the dead.

The need to see Remus, to make sure he is alive, is a physical thing. She asks every ally she sees until Aberforth, shooting spells out the seventh floor windows, finally has an answer. _The courtyard_. _Dolohov_. And she doesn't remember running there, although she must've, because she sees the curse that ends her husband's life hit true, sees his body fall and her world shatters –

But it doesn't end.

All that is left is the sound of Bellatrix's cackle. It echoes terrifyingly throughout her head; the absence of self is startling and all she can think about is her baby, waiting for his mum to come home but his dad's dead and her dad's dead and what's the point in fighting if they're all just going to die anyway-? She sobs, lifting her wand half-heartedly, determined to make this one last stand, despite the hopelessness of it all.

_This is it_, she thinks, despite herself, _this is the end._

And it is.

**colin creevey**

The coin burns in his pocket, and to battle he comes. A year of playing muggle, keeping his head down and his wand locked in his trunk, and he is bursting for a fight. He has never believed that Harry Potter will lose and he does not start now, immersed in the gruesome fighting – it's a lot worse than he could've ever imagined and he's going to have nightmares for the rest of his _life_, for sure, but he keeps going because that's what Harry would do – but there's a reason why underage students weren't allowed to fight. He learns it too late, when the cutting curse rips open his throat and he chokes to death.

**severus snape**

Lily's eyes are looking at him the same way they did after he called her a mudblood, all hate and a touch of regret; and despite the fact that Nagini's venom scorches through his veins like fire and death crawls up the back of his throat, that accident in fifth year is still one of the biggest regrets of his life. The day he first lost her, and then he just kept on losing her like a fucking trail of dominoes being knocked over, one after another.

But this time he just looks into those green, green eyes – and ignores the glasses – and pretends that she was there all along, and that he never lost her. Her eyes are the last thing he ever sees and it is beautiful how his love stays until the very end.

**bellatrix lestrange**

She chases after death like the storm she is, abandon and abandon, a twirling tornado of spells and pain. Her death is both fitting and utterly ironic because she is as much a seasoned fighter – the Dark Lord's finest lieutenant – as she is the delicate daughter of the late Cygnus Black – proud of both, of course, but proudest of the former.

In the end, it's the two of them against everything. A lord and his favourite. Abandon and abandon, always, fighting the ginger mother, insults staining the air with something debauch and thrilling. Blood pumps through her body like a drum, her laughter hysterically brilliant as it bubbles from her throat, wand halfway through a jabbing movement - and this is when the eldest Black sister falls to the _Avada Kedavra_, eyes wide in shock.

**lord voldemort**

They will write about his death for many years, and the books will grow mouldy and dusty in ancient libraries, pages rumpled from children flicking impatiently to the right page to reference information for their History of Magic essays. They will celebrate his fall every year, partying and mourning until night fades to morning and life continues. They will tell their children the tale, voices quick and exaggerated when they say how his own curse killed him, killed him good. They will remember his chilling laugh in their sleep and see his red, red eyes when they think of the war -

And in this way he lives forever, kept in the mind of them all, unforgettable for all his vile deeds.


End file.
